


Something Borrowed

by Northernflicker



Category: Zero Escape (Video Games), Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Character Death, F/M, Five Stages of Grief, Grief/Mourning, Moving On
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-28
Updated: 2016-07-28
Packaged: 2018-07-27 09:34:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7612957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Northernflicker/pseuds/Northernflicker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’d say that losing Diana was the worst thing to happen to him, if he wasn’t extra aware of the six billion lives it cost for them to even get this limited time together.  But life on the moon isn’t too bad, considering. Even the weakened gravity stops being a novelty after a few years. And the feeling of bitter sadness that catches him when he thinks of her, that will go away too, eventually.</p><p>(Sigma Klim, working on the AB Project and trying to make sense of the universe that fans infinitely onward even though he can hardly breathe sometimes, when he thinks of how Diana is gone.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something Borrowed

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this at 4am and made myself sad :-(  
> suggested listening: What Sarah Said by Death Cab for Cutie ("Love is watching someone die")

( _Can’t sleep, huh?)_

Luna is making a flower crown. He doesn’t like for her to use too many of the flowers, so she’s knows to be careful and fully use what she takes. Not that it matters, really. They probably have too many flowers in B Garden to begin with. And they can plant more. Still, he watches her in full attention to her craft, and thinks that it’s good practice for her fine motor skills, if nothing else.

(A big gray space. Diana, with red hair and soft eyes and a muted green dress, an instant spark of color against drab, dreary place. _No. What room am I in?)_

The air is softer here in B Garden, somehow, than in the rest of the facility. Sometimes, if he closes his eyes, he can ignore the sound of fans pumping stale oxygen through the vents and pretend it’s actually a summer breeze, instead. (Though the temperature here is more suited for an early spring, perhaps.)

He can’t remember if Luna’s hair is the exact same shade as Diana’s. He can’t remember if their voices are different. When he tries to remember Diana’s voice, he gets Luna’s in his head instead. But it doesn’t matter. This is the last calm moment he’ll have before he has to get into the real final preparations for the AB game, so he tries to enjoy it.

(Something in his chest still aches when he looks at her and her big blue eyes, though he doesn’t know why. _This is going to be a garden,_ he says pointing, _there’s going to be a bench right over there, and a huge arching tree, and a stream. It was one of my favorite rooms)._

To be perfectly honest, he doesn’t remember planting flowers in B Garden. They just seemed to show up. A lot of things in his life happen this way.

If this were Earth, he would smell dirt and grass and flowers and lingering sunlight. But it’s not Earth, so all he has is artificial light and recycled oxygen flowing through the vents to try and recreate what he used to know instinctively.

(Tentative smiles. Patience, forgiveness, companionship. He can see it in her eyes. It feels stupid, but with his twenty-two year old mind, it feels like they were meant for each other.)

He wonders how many times he’s sat here before (other versions of him, all heading down the same path). Akane would know, probably. Akane knows a lot of things.

He feels like he could sit on this bench forever. He feels like he could set down roots here and never move again. The anxious drive he has instilled in him for all these years tries to pry him off the bench. He has no time to think. He has to work. Get off the bench, Klim, go do something useful.

But for once, he tells himself, there is nothing left for him to do but wait. Doctor Klim betrays nothing on his face. He stares at the boardwalk and Luna fumbles with her craft on her lap, humming a tune from her music box. He doesn’t try to imagine or predict what it will be like to see Diana again, forty five years in the past. He knows nothing will prepare him.

He used to cherish quiet moments like these. But now, he thinks, he has too many. Luna shows him her craft when she’s done, shyly, as if she fears he won't like it, as if he could ever bring himself to hate anything she creates. Good job, he tells her. She sighs. Everything will be different tomorrow, she says.

Yes. But I know you’ll do a fine job.

Thank you, Doctor. Good luck.

It is not the last time they see each other before the Project is set to start, but somehow, it means something different when she says it now.

* * *

Diana’s death is slow. Tortuously slow, and it’s just not _fair._ The universe won’t let him have this. It is determined to take all it can from Sigma. She just. Fades. Her skin is so pale it blends in with the sheets. She’s almost translucent. It feels wrong. It feels like anger and fear and helplessness, as he’s holding her cold hand in his and all she can do is look at him with those big blue eyes.

He needs to find a way to fix this, he thinks, it’s too early, please, you can’t leave yet. I’ve still got forty five years to spend here, I can’t do it alone. Please. Please.

(“You’re lucky you had any time at all,” Akane says, looking wistful. Three years is a long time, she says, and she doesn’t say that forty five years is an even longer time. She just puts her hand on his shoulder and works Diana’s stiff hand from his own, where he is clinging to it blindly, desperately, as if he can convey some of his own warmth to her and make her live again, as if if he doesn’t let go she won’t be truly gone, as if-)

 _How could this happen_ , he thinks. The thought pulses in his head. How could something like this happen? He did everything he was supposed to do. He’s following all the rules Akane gave him, so why…? Why does she have to die?

When Diana runs out of words she just looks at him. When she runs out of strength she just breathes in horrible, wheezing breaths, as if her lungs don’t have the energy to expand anymore. And all Sigma can do is look at her and think, dumbly, _how could this happen?_

And she just watches him, with her warm blue eyes, so impossibly full of love and longing, and Sigma doesn’t think he’ll ever forget exactly how they look now, trained on him like a lifeline. He thinks of all the things she’s trying to convey in one gaze, things like _I love you_ and _I’m sorry_ and _I wish we had more time._

And all he can think with full clarity, rebounding in his head with maddening volume, is _how could any of this happen?_

The thought pounds against his skull. Or maybe that’s just his heartbeat.

(“You’ll see her again,” Akane says softly. “You get a second chance.” Somehow, these words stick with him even when he starts to forget everything he used to know about Diana. Things that didn’t need reminding. Things like her favorite color and how she does her hair. He doesn’t even remember what she said to him as she lay dying, and he hates himself for that. But he gets a second chance, if all goes well with the project).

Diana lingers for hours and hours. She breathes slowly and loses consciousness but she just doesn’t _go._ It gets to the point where Sigma actually wants her heart to finally give out, just so this can finally be over, so he doesn’t have to watch her eyes move behind her eyelids and think that maybe this time it’s alright.

Maybe this is a timeline is where she recovers. Where she wakes up suddenly and it’s a miracle, but she’s perfectly alright. And he takes care of her and she’s fine, and she doesn’t have to leave him or be in pain anymore.

But in the end, he takes her necklace and her memory with him, and he can’t go back to the infirmary for a really long time. The puzzles are all done in there, anyway. There’s nothing else he needs.

("You’ll live through this," Akane says. She means it to be reassuring, in her all-knowing reach of the multiverse ways, with her I-know-more-about-the-universe-than-you-do voice. What she’s really saying is: I know you’ll live through this, because we need at least one future where the AB project exists and you signed up for this and this timeline leads to that future. What she doesn’t say is “You’ve lived through this a thousand times already,” because it certainly feels that way, but that doesn’t really make it any easier this time, now does it?)

Still. Diana takes a long time to die. He stays awake and holds her hand, it’s cold even when she’s still alive to talk to him, and it’s cold after her lips turn purple and she can’t find her voice anymore.

And it’s cold when she’s dead, too.

She doesn’t look anything like her old self when she dies. And her eyes don’t close all the way and he’s going to have to find somewhere to bury her, or cremate her, or do something. And he’s going to be completely alone for the next forty-something years, that too.

He stands woodenly. Looks at her. Thinks about how death turns people into a thing, an object. How it’s not really _her_ in front of him anymore. He thinks about what he needs to do, and he tries not to feel anything, if just for now.

* * *

But Diana isn’t dead. It was all a big misunderstanding, you see. A huge mistake. Diana didn’t die, she’s just. Resting. In the healing pod. It’s why he had to close the cover and turn on cryo-freeze. For when she gets better and wakes up. Because she will wake up, and he will be ready for her, so they can both move on with their lives and get out of this nightmare.

In the meantime, he studies genetics and cloning. He’ll study robotics too, but he can’t make Luna yet because Diana isn’t dead. She isn’t dead. So he can’t make Luna yet. Simple. Okay?

One time he opens the pod to look at her, just to check. What he sees is a hardened frozen solid image of something that used to be Diana, but it isn’t now. It’s too different from what he wants to see. He closes the pod and he hates the Infirmary that she helped build just so she could go and die in it. He tries not to think about the process of dying, of blood clots and death hardened muscles and failing organs and inflated lungs.

Anyway. Anyway, this Diana is nothing like the Diana he knows. His Diana is full of life and love and happiness. His Diana is warm and alive and real, and if he reaches out he could touch her, almost-

Then he wakes up.

Where is he? In the lab. A coat draped over him. He has notes scattered across the table. He doesn’t remember letting himself sleep. A baby is crying in the other room.

Do all children cry this much? Or just this one?

He shuffles over to the impromptu nursery anyway, yawning. He frowns. He remembers being convinced somewhere in his mind that Diana was in the pod in the Infirmary. But no, there is no pod there, Diana is in the B Garden Pod. And Alice and Clover and Phi are in the other pods, and they’re in the Treatment Center, and he knows this, so it must have been a dream. Maybe all of this is just a crazy dream.  

Akane disapproves. It’s too early to create Kyle, she says. These clones should not exist. She frowns. Work on Lagomorph instead, she suggests, if you need something to do. Just do something. Build the Rec Room. Work on the Pantry Puzzles. There’s still so much work to be done here.

Sigma wants to tell her to stop, to get out of here, to stop checking in on him like she cares about how he’s doing when they both know she’s only doing this because she has to keep the project on track. But he says nothing, and she leaves again.

But Akane is right. A few weeks later (he thinks), he wakes up and there is no sound in the facility. The clone he created and never thought of a name for dies in his sleep and Sigma didn’t even notice until it was too late.

He wasn’t there for this child. Akane is right. He’s not in the right frame of mind to be raising children. (Will he ever be? He thought he would be raising Kyle with Diana. Children need a mother, right?) But that turned out to be wrong, just like so many other things he thought he knew.

He sits in B Garden near Diana’s grave. _Tu fui, Ego Eris,_ it tells him. Sigma hates it. A grave means that Diana is dead, and that still feels wrong to him. But Akane tells him it has to be there. Akane says a lot of things like that. So he trusts her, again.

Underground, there is a healing pod that has Diana in it. But she’s only staying there temporarily, of course. Because she’s going to come back. She's going to tease him for worrying about her, because she’s very much alive, see?

He stands up. There’s far less gravity on the moon, but he still feels heavier today, somehow.

* * *

So he builds stupiddumbannoying overly complicated puzzles and furnishes these useless rooms that will mean nothing and he builds his worthless prototype robots and he feels something in his chest wind tighter and tighter every day, building up and up and up.

He spends his time alone. Cloning falls by the wayside. It is still too early for Kyle to exist, so why bother trying now? He wants to be alone anyway. He hates when Akane visits. He needs to work.

He tells her that, and she looks at him with sad noble eyes as if she wasn’t the one who was making him do all this in the first place, and says _Take care of yourself, Doctor Klim,_ as if she wasn’t the one who started all this in the first place.

Distantly he wonders when he crossed the line from being called Sigma to Doctor Klim, but he finds that he doesn’t really care what she calls him as long as his work gets done on time. So he spends his time with lifeless puzzles and simple robots that can only carry limited conversations (Hello my name is how are you today, ect).

Its mind numbing work and he needs it, so he eats tasteless rations and waters the plants in the B Garden (it was the only place in this worthless joint that ever brought him any joy, after all.) And he sits at Diana’s grave and thinks about how she liked the B Garden just as much as he did.

He starts to hate B Garden after that, just a little, for owning a piece of Diana’s happiness, for hosting her ghost. But he has to fix the lights in order for a puzzle to work, so he spends a lot of time there, turning the lights on and off again, making sure everything functions smoothly. And then he leaves Diana in the pod in the B Garden to make his way over to the prototype robots to do another round of boring dull conversations.

And he’s angry. He’s angry at this stupid, senseless universe for doing this to him and he’s angry at what’s left of humanity for being so stubborn and surviving against all odds. Don’t they know that Diana is dead? Will anyone remember her, down on that turning red planet?

He wants to hurt something. He wants to hurt himself. He wants to remember what it feels like to have his arms blown off. To have his eye punctured. He wants to be writhing on the floor in pain just so he doesn’t have to spend all day thinking about her. He wants something he can control.

He wants to break something. But he knows if he does he’ll just have to fix it himself later, and he can’t be bothered.

* * *

Akane is livid. It’s one of the rare times he’s seen her mad, actually. She’s been pretty patient up until this point, and to be honest Sigma is losing track of the time. But eventually her sporadic visits fade from sympathetic glances and gentle suggestions to rough prompting, and then to flat out telling him that he needs to hurry up and build some robots, Klim.

“Do you know how long it’s been? You can’t ignore your responsibilities. You have a job to do here.”

“What are you talking about,” he says, and it doesn’t even sound like his voice, it sounds like it’s coming from a high corner of the room, or from one of his robots, maybe.

“I’m saying that you need to start thinking about Kyle. Or Luna, or Lagomorph.” Akane fires off the names in rapid succession. She’s always been excitable, a fast talker, but this is too much for Sigma to keep up with. “These things take time, Klim, if you don’t study now then you won’t know how to create them when we need you to.”

He stares at her. He wants to blame her. _You didn’t tell me this would happen,_ he thinks, _you didn’t tell me it would hurt this much_. He should have had a warning. Something like “Hey Sigma, the universe is large and cruel, and you’re going to have to do this all on your own, so heads up.”

Akane stares back, unaware of his thoughts. “At least start with Luna,” she tries, “I see you’ve already got some prototypes working already.”

He blinks, “No. No, these won’t do,” he says suddenly, a bolt of panic flashing through him, “I need to keep working on them,” he insists, with more energy than he thought possible, “This is nowhere near where the base for Luna needs to be.”

Akane’s lips get thinner. That’s how he knows she’s getting impatient with him “We don’t have that kind of time, Sigma,” she says firmly, and good, she's using his name again. “Luna will be good for you. It will give you some interaction. Something to do. It will help with...the grief.”

 _But I’m not grieving,_ is what he wants to say. I’m fine. I don’t need help with the grief because I have dealt with it myself already, so thank you Akane, for your suggestions, and goodbye, Prototype CR 649-0915 and I have a riveting conversation to get to. We’re venturing into " _how is the weather?"_ territory today. It’s very important, you see, vital to our mission.

But even he can admit that it sounds stupid in his head, so he looks at her mutely like he doesn’t understand, like this doesn’t compute, like he’s another one of his robots and if Akane can just speak slower, with fewer words, then maybe-

“For God’s sake Sigma, you still have her in the cryopod in B Garden!” Akane is angry because she finally realized (remembered) just who it is she’s entrusting her Life’s mission to, and he is, and always has been, an idiot.

He frowns belatedly. Something about her tone doesn't sit right with him. Akane doesn’t get to talk about Diana like this. So he gnashes his teeth together and feels something swelling up in his throat.

“Shut up,” he bites out, finally, after glaring at her for a full minute. Akane watches him with analytical eyes, and he hates her for it. She’s too different from Diana. He doesn’t want her here.

“You think this is right? To keep her here like this?”

“What would you have me do?” he snarls, standing in one fluid motion, one hand quaking from where it is pressed on his desk.

“Bury her Sigma! Take her out of the pod! She isn’t supposed to be in there!” Akane takes a step forward but does not break eye contact with him.

He feels something wild and terrifying clawing at his throat. “No,” he says stubbornly, as steadily as he can manage. “No. You’re wrong. That’s why the pod is there.”

“The pod is there for other reasons. Bury her in front of the grave.”

“That’s not-” he tries, fresh waves of anxiety and fear bearing down on him. “I can’t-” Suddenly he is overwhelmed with dread at the thought of standing in Diana’s grave, throwing the dirt over her, covering her, _suffocating_ her, leaving her trapped in the ground forever, he can almost hear the sound the dirt will make against her-

“You _have_ to.”

And that’s it. That’s all it takes. A sudden undeniable rage comes over him, so powerful that he cannot move, he cannot think, all he knows is how wrong this is, and all he’s been hearing is what he _has_ to do, and he’s so tired of this, suddenly.

“I- I have to.” he says hollowly, “I have to.”

His heart is racing, and he’s so angry, all of a sudden, and he doesn’t even know why. His entire frame is shaking and the phrase races around his head. He sinks back into his seat and breathes until he is filled with a calm that almost masks this budding hysteria he can feel under his skin.

“I don’t...have to.” he says slowly, staring at his lap, his voice cracking and fading in and out from long periods of disuse, “I don’t have to. You can’t make me do anything. You’ll just leave again, and… Diana can stay in the pod.”

Akane watches him curiously, throughout all this. “You don’t think it’s selfish? To use her body like this just because you don’t want her dead?”

The calm sways. Reasserts itself.

“No,” Sigma says, and suddenly he’s more sure about this than he ever has been about anything in this entire god-forsaken project. He clenches and unclenches his hands. The whole room has taken an other-worldly feel to it, or maybe that’s just him.

Because that’s just it. He doesn’t _have_ to. He still has a long time to go before he travels back to meet Diana again, and in the meantime he has- what? A robot and a computer generated AI? A clone of himself? This is all he gets?

“Sigma,” Akane says cautiously, though her eyes are still hard and cold, “You need to get back to work. This is bigger than the two of us. It’s bigger than what you feel for Diana.”

He flinches at that. Akane softens her tone. “I know what you had was important,” she says, “But you have to let her go.”

But no, Akane still doesn’t get it. He doesn’t have to let her go if he doesn’t want to. He can keep her here, he _can_ and maybe she’ll come back. Akane just can’t see that, even with her all-knowing gaze. He’s got to make her see.

Akane is still talking. “She won’t be forgotten, Sigma, she’ll live on in Luna. You can keep her memory alive by sharing what it was that made her special. Come on-”

“You can’t just-” Sigma rasps, numbly. He clears his throat. “You can’t just. Make a copy like that. It won’t be her. It’s too different.”

“Sigma…” What she doesn’t say here still lingers in the air. _But you have to. You don’t want to, but you must do it anyway._

“Sigma, you can’t keep going like this. You have to survive this. And I know Luna won’t replace her. But it will make it easier.”

He can’t think of anything to say to that. “I will,” he lies, just so that Akane will leave him alone, and she won’t try to go behind his back and bury Diana herself. “You know I will. Just… give me some time to think.”

Akane doesn’t look convinced. But she lets him leave anyway.

* * *

He does what Akane wants. Mostly. Diana remains in the pod, for now. But he takes his robots more seriously and starts seriously constructing the frame for Luna. He drafts some early versions of Lagomorph, edits pixels until Akane is satisfied enough to leave him alone and not hover over him all day to make sure he’s actually working and not just playing minesweeper or online poker or something.

His normal eye is especially bloodshot. His left arm won’t stop twitching. Bizarrely, he feels the need to go down to Earth and personally see all the destruction and death he’s working to prevent, if only so he’ll feel more human and reconnect with the purpose of this project.

Right now nothing feels real. He feels like all his reactions are delayed, or wrong somehow, and he can never think of anything to say to Akane’s small talk. He misses when it was just him and his robots. There was something steady there, something reliable. They never did anything unexpected. They only ever said what he programmed them to say.

He feels like it could be anywhere from six days to six months to six years since Diana died. He has no way of telling, and he’s too afraid to ask.

Akane won’t stay forever. He usually can never predict when she’ll resurface or when she leaves. This time, however, she lingers in the corners of his work space for much longer than usual and brings him actual food and even tea, occasionally.

She doesn’t talk about life on Earth or anything outside the Rhizome, so he lets her keep it that way. In turn, she doesn’t badger him about how the project's coming along besides the information he volunteers to her, and they both pretend Diana isn’t frozen a few rooms away.

But still, he does almost everything Akane asks of him. He picks up his books again and digs out his notes and writes until his hand cramps. He spends time memorizing tables and facts without thinking about why he needs to be doing so. He mindlessly churns information through his head, slowly making sense of complicated theories and plowing through textbooks and stockpiling information until he doesn’t have feelings anymore, all he has are facts about robotics and Artificial Intelligence.

It helps. Most of the time. He spends a lot of time on Lagomorph; he even starts to get his speech pattern down. Thinking of rabbit puns eases the frown etched into his face, if only slightly.

He does this for a long time. He lets Akane take care of the B Garden and he doesn’t go back in there for a long time. He feels Diana’s necklace in his pocket, occasionally, but it makes him feel something cold and dead and heavy in his chest, so he withdraws his hand and throws himself back into his work and tries his best to forget again.

One day, however, he wakes up and wonders what the sunrise looks like on Earth. He’s going to get a chance to go back. But this Diana, she’ll never go back. She’s stuck in that pod, only because he refuses to let her go.

It’s early. The facility isn’t awake yet. If they were on Earth, the B Garden would be covered in an ethereal hue, a washed out blue-gray that comes before the sun rises. He can see it in his head. The shadows would be scattered and still, the grass still wet. And he would kneel at her grave and watch the sun rise over a quiet, waking world.

But this life isn’t anything like that. The B Garden is alive and loud and bright, at all times of the day, unless he turns the lights off. It feels like stepping into another time zone, going from a frigid January evening to a world where it’s three in the afternoon on a humid summer day.

But it’s dawn now, he knows it. A certain circadian rhythm that never adjusted to the moon tells him that its dawn where he wants to be and he’s all out of options.

The pod rises from the ground. There’s a shovel behind the tree that grows sturdier every day. He feels sick, to even have to do this himself. (He could ask Akane, if he really wanted to, but no, it always has been his cross to bear).

He’s tried everything. But Diana isn’t coming back. She’s gone. He’ll never know this version of her again. And the next Diana he meets- it won’t really _be_ her. Another Sigma will go through this after him. His struggle right now, in B Garden, it will mean nothing. All of this will mean nothing if the AB project is not successful.

His shovel hits the soil with a satisfying crunch; he leans into it, tearing through the topsoil, feeling his heartbeat thick in his throat. He works rhythmically, ignoring the whimsical feel of the B Garden’s brightness, trying not to feel like it’s mocking him.

He focuses on digging and tossing the dirt, dig, toss, crunch, the sound of metal on metal when he hits an occasional rock. The unearthly stillness of the pod. The oppressive quiet in the room. The sound of water running.

Dig, toss

He followed all of Akane’s rules.

Dig, toss

He followed his own rules.

Dig, toss

If he works on Lagomorph,

Dig, toss

If he works on Luna

Dig, toss

If he studies more

Dig, toss

If he listens to Akane

Dig, toss

Then, Diana will come back.

He loses himself in the rhyme. He blocks out all thoughts with the sound of his shovel hitting the dirt. Eventually, he stops. He leans into the shovel.

But Diana is still not here. Diana is gone. He can’t bargain for her life. She will always be gone, for him, no matter what he does. If only he had convinced her to go back to Earth sooner. If only one of them had seen what was to come.

This could have been prevented. He would have been fine with being separated, if only so she could _live._

His hands sting slightly. And Diana is still dead in the pod, now above him, and she has been, for a very long time. When he looks over, Akane is on the bench nearby. She wanders over with a solemn look on her face. Together, they open the pod.

Diana is still there. She looks the same as she did before, only now more obviously frozen. Cryo doesn’t stop the decaying process completely, after all. Slowly, against his better judgement, he brings his hand to her face. It would have been too much, he thinks, to touch her hand and not feel it warm and pliable and alive beneath his.

His hand is on her face. Gently, he feels her cheek in his palm. It is too hard, too cold, too inhumane. He knows now, that she would not want him hanging onto her like this. This isn’t her, really. But a part of him still wants to ignore what he’s seeing and close the pod door and try to forget anyway.

He feels something warm and wet on his face. He has not cried in a long time. But he cries now, as he tries to remember if his hand was always so big compared to hers, if she is just as small and delicate as he remembers, or smaller now, somehow. He doesn’t want to commit this version of Diana to memory, but it is the last time he will see her for a long time, so he tries to remember anyway.

He knows the Blue Bird necklace is still in his pocket, but it feels wrong, somehow, to have taken it away from her. He wants her to wake up. He wishes again, desperately, irrationally, for her eyes to flutter open, for her to smile sheepishly at the sight of him, as if he caught her napping on the job. He wants to see her eyes bright again and her cheeks round and flushed and full of color and here with him.

He wants to feel her small hand in his and he wants to hear her tease him for calling himself a doctor even though he technically never finished his PhD. He wants to plan this stupid facility with her and talk about the future as if it really existed for them. He wants so desperately to see her again and to hold her small frame to him and tell her it’s okay, he misses her and he loves her but its okay, it’s going to be fine, and that they’ll meet again someday.

But Diana’s face is cold and pale and her eyes are still closed, and he is clutching the ground in the garden despite not remembering falling to his knees. He feels Akane’s presence next to him, silent and solitary, and he feels a flicker of gratitude that she is here with him to keep him on track despite all the other things she could be doing. To give up now would mean throwing away his chances, and he can’t afford to do that.

Eventually, they lower Diana in front of the grave. Sigma is grateful, in a morbid sense, that he had the sense to cross her arms in front of her before he had her frozen. It looks more peaceful this way. It looks almost natural.

Diana is expressionless, which is, by default, sad for her. He recalls her face animated and joyful, giggling and sharing stupid puns, guiding him through physical therapy when his arms still weren’t completely reliable.

He wonders if he’s supposed to say something here. He glances at Akane, who is looking at the headstone. He decides that Diana will hear him whether he says any of this out loud or not.

“Diana,” Akane says, after a while, taking a deep breath. “I did not know you as well as I could. I’m sorry this funeral is so late. But. I know you were a kind soul. I know you were patient and smart and caring. I’m sorry I couldn’t do more for you. I-” Akane holds her eyes closed briefly, presses her lips together. “I’m sorry any of this had to happen. Sigma and I are going to succeed in our project, and he’s going to see you again, and you two will find a timeline where you can both be happy together.”

Akane glances at him, looking slightly embarrassed. She clasps her hands in front of her, bowed slightly.

He smiles thinly. Sigma should say something. He knows this, yet he cannot stop staring into the grave. Not directly at her, though, a little off center. Akane’s eulogy runs through his head. How does he put into words everything he’s feeling? He’s had more than enough time to plan something. But everything he thinks of falls flat.

In the end, he stays silent, reaching for the shovel with shaking hands to scatter the dirt back over her, raining it onto her porcelain face and out of his life forever.

* * *

When he sees her again, years in the future but also years in the past, he doesn’t have the words to describe how it feels when you see someone and remember spending three intimate years of your life together, and then _they go over and introduce themselves to you._

Later, Phi will joke that Sigma is quiet because he realized that he doesn’t know how to flirt without being horribly inappropriate. Sigma lets her have it because hey, it is a little funny, and his twenty two year old self did say some cringe-worthy things.

But for now, all he can do is stare, amidst all the warning bells in his head telling him to run off and hide.

“I’m Diana,” she smiles brightly, easily, “It’s nice to meet you.”

(It’s nice to meet you, too)


End file.
